Natural history is one of the most interesting and absorbing of all studies, and the visitor to our menagerie finds much zoological gratification. The hippopotamus, sleeping or floundering in his tank, and raising his head at intervals above the surface of the water for the purpose of respiration, is never without a wondering audience. His is a harmless disposition and he is a pet with the animal keepers. His den is too small for the water to cover him completely and frequently he is scrubbed with soap. He enjoys the operation immensely unless the soapsuds enter his cavernous mouth, which surely is annoying enough to provoke the most mild-mannered being. His skin is of a dark reddish-brown color, full of cracks, chaps and cross-etchings, with dapplings of irregular dark spots, and is probably two inches thick. He is more than ten feet long and nearly six feet high. When he gives voice, the lions are humiliated and the tigers acknowledge defeat. It is a deafening kind of interrupted roar, between that of a bull and the braying of an elephant. His daily diet is bushels of potatoes, apples, carrots, oats, bran, hay and salt. Keepers say that the only hippopotami born in captivity are in the zoo of one of the big cities. Ignorance permitted the first one which saw the light to die. Keepers feared to put it in the water, thinking it would drown, and tried to nurse it with a bottle. It was dead in ten days. Then it was decided not to interfere when the mother brought forth its next young. The result was the discovery that it nursed under water. The first genuine hippopotamus ever seen in America was exhibited by Barnum in his New York museum in August, 1861. He advertised the animal extensively and ingeniously as the “great behemoth of the Scriptures,” and thousands, including many biblical students, flocked to see it. [Illustration: A “MAN KILLER,” PHOTOGRAPHED HALF AN HOUR AFTER HAVING SLAIN AN ANNOYER.] Circus people will travel miles into the presence of a giraffe. They want the animal with the elongated neck to rub their hand with its tongue. They say that good luck is sure to follow the operation. The privilege is one rarely accorded, for giraffes are very costly and delicate, and, though popular menagerie inmates, are infrequently seen nowadays. The first one born in captivity in America saw the light of day in Cincinnati on October 20, 1889. It was five feet high. Daisy, measuring eighteen feet from the ground to the tips of her ears, and the last giraffe then on exhibition with any travelling show, was killed during a voyage to Europe--a lurch of the ship broke her neck.